"Alabama police tase three times, pepper-spray, arrest, and jail deaf, retarded man because he took too long in a Dollar General store bathroom, and didn’t come out when called. Here’s the “you’ve got to be kidding me” part: “A spokesman for the Mobile Police Department said the officers’ actions were justified because the man was armed with a potential weapon — an umbrella.” They went ahead and jailed him even after learning about his deafness and severe mental disability.

Police tase a grandfather and a pregnant woman after responding to a noise complaint. Bonus points: The grandfather is a “church family counselor and a bible study teacher.” Double bonus points: They were responding to a child’s baptism party.

Boise police effectively sodomize a man with a taser, then threaten to tase his genitals, too. He was handcuffed at the time. He was tased apparently for protesting while the officers were on top of him that he could breathe. Link includes audio."

"A lawyer who moments earlier had been complaining to friends about police overreaction in the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., got a taste of the Gates treatment himself after loudly chanting 'I hate the police' near a traffic stop in Northwest Washington, D.C.

...One officer reacted strongly to Tuma's song. "Hey! Hey! Who do you think you're talking to?" Tuma recalled the officer shouting as he strode across an intersection to where Tuma was standing. "Who do you think you are to think you can talk to a police officer like that?" the police officer said, according to Luke Platzer, 30, one of Tuma's companions.

Tuma said he responded, "It is not illegal to say I hate the police. It's not illegal to express my opinion walking down the street."

According to Tuma and Platzer, the officer pushed Tuma against an electric utility box, continuing to ask who he thought he was and to say he couldn't talk to police like that.

...D.C.'s disorderly conduct statute bars citizens from breaching the peace by doing anything "in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others" or by shouting or making noise "either outside or inside a building during the nighttime to the annoyance or disturbance of any considerable number of persons."

The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has said that the city's disorderly conduct law is "confusing, overbroad, frequently used by police to harass disfavored individuals" and that it "violates constitutional rights of free speech, assembly and petition."

...While the Gates incident has largely been treated as a story about race, many have noted, from the Los Angeles Times to Christopher Hitchens to Maureen Dowd, that the incident said as much about police use of disorderly conduct laws. Tuma agrees. "People talk about the Gates thing in terms of race, but it's an ongoing problem of police using disorderly conduct to shut people up," Tuma said."

The whole Crowley/Gates thing blew up when I was on vacation... it struck me less about race [probably in part cause I'm a white dude] than it did about authority and its misuse. Basically, it boils down to the fact if you make a cop look bad by yelling at him in front of others, puncture his ego a little bit, you go to jail. Stuff and nonsense. This was probably my favorite summation of the whole thing.

"...But after you put down the peace pipe, a legitimate and important difference remains. It's structural, and cultural, and (over the past four decades of relentless Drug Warring and Constitution-eroding), judicial as well. There is a strain in law enforcement, backed by various vague statutes, thousands of politicians, and everyone who tends to side with authority against an obnoxious popoff, in which it's considered perfectly acceptable form to arrest, detain, or otherwise punish a non-threatening person for being an asshole. This includes the perceived assholery of yelling about one's real (and sometimes imagined) trampled rights. If a person is considered undesirable by a police officer, for whatever reason, it's far too easy to ruin his day, even if no law has remotely been broken. And as Balko has led the world in documenting, the literal militarization of domestic police forces, combined with awful Drug War-related enforcement, has caused grave injustice and the death of innocents..."

"...Dunphy's point. He's arguing that you can't possibly know what's going on in a police officer's head when he stops you or confronts you. You can't know what circumstances led him to stop you. So you'd best just shut up and submit, even he asks you to do something that you aren't obligated to do under the Constitution. Dunphy's using his unlikely hypothetical to plant the threat that any noncompliance with an officer's demands may end with him shooting you. Put another way, because you can't possibly know the reasons why the officer has stopped you, giving lip about your rights may well endanger your life."

"Agnes Lawless had a bad day. First, she was rear-ended by a hit-and-run driver. Shortly afterward, she was in a convenience store when a man approached her from behind and grabbed her neck. As she pulled away, he jammed a gun in her neck so hard it left a bruise. The man was Alberto Lopez Sr., an on-duty police officer and the father of the driver who had hit her car. Lopez arrested Lawless for assaulting him and later testified that when he ordered Lawless and friends to the floor, she 'freaked out' and begin hitting him. Fortunately, for Lawless, the store's security cameras showed exactly what happened and charges against her were dismissed."

"NBC Miami reports that Jeremiah Ramirez, "an eight-year-old boy who lost his dad to cancer," was relieved of souveniers from his trip to Disney World by a few Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport...

"A Virginia woman has been arrested for blogging about the members of a local drug task force. The charge is harassment of a police officer. She apparently posted on the blog one officer’s home address, as well as photos of all members of the task force, and a photo of one officer getting into his unmarked car in front of his home...

It doesn’t look like the woman was accusing these officers of any misconduct. She appears to have been merely goading them. That of course makes her less sympathetic, though I don’t think it would or should have much effect on whether or not her arrest was constitutional. The charge for which she was arrested seems like it could just as easily be applied to someone who publicly criticizes or alleges misconduct against an undercover officer by name. That can’t be illegal. And I don’t know that you can really make a distinction under the law.

[From the comments]

I don’t think it’s a tough call. I despise the thought of undercover policework for ANY crime. We aren’t meant to have a secret police force. The bulk of undercover work is done because the “crimes” being investigated are consensual or victimless. How much undercover work do you see for assault, rape, burglary, robbert, etc? It’s always for gambling, drugs, prostitution, internet (adult) child enticement. If the state can’t investigate it openly, the state should have no interest in prosecuting it..."

"At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the northeast of England, was remanded in custody for having “excessively noisy sex.”

...So how did Cartwright’s expressions of noisy joy become a police case, scheduled to be ruled on at Newcastle Crown Court, one of the biggest courts in the north of England? Because, unbelievably, Cartwright had previously been served with an anti-social behavior order (ASBO)—a civil order used to control the minutiae of British people’s behavior—that forbade her from making “excessive noise during sex” anywhere in England.

That’s right. Going even further than Orwell’s imagined authoritarian hellhole, where at least there was a wood or two where people could indulge their sexual impulses, the local authorities in Wearside made all of England a no-go zone for Cartwright’s noisy shenanigans... "

"That's from Florida Republican state Rep. William D. Snyder, defending the arrest of two Florida men for displaying alleged gang hand signals on their Myspace pages. Not that those men have been charged with any gang-related crimes, mind you, just with posting pictures of themselves making hand signals."

"Elderly Columbia, Maryland couple who were subjected to a mistaken police raid file a lawsuit. This was the raid where, according to the couple, the husband asked if he could go out to restrain his dog. The police said no, then went out and killed it."

"An article in Cannabis News by Harry G. Levine, a professor of sociology at Queens College, City University of New York, explains why New York City is the 'marijuana arrest capital of the world.' The law states that possessing a small amount of pot results in $100 civil citation for the first offense. Yet 40,300 people were arrested and jailed in NYC last year for possessing small amounts of pot. How so? By trickery on the part of the NYPD. Police officers convince people to pull their stash out of their pocket, promising to go easy on them if they do, then bust them on charges of having marijuana 'open to public view,' which means they can be handcuffed, fingerprinted, and jailed on a misdemeanor charge..."

FBI investigating one D.C. and five Prince George’s County, Maryland police officers for involvement in a gambling ring. The ring itself may be responsible for as many as five homicides.

I mentioned the case of the Philadelphia cop caught on surveillance video assaulting a woman in my crime column last week, but it’s worth noting that the store clerk in the case claims officers other than the one who committed the assault also asked him erase the videotape. They were cleared by internal affairs. Seem to be quite a few problems with the level of professionalism in Philadelphia right now.

A Seattle police officer who shoved an innocent man head-first into a wall, putting the man into a coma, won’t be prosecuted. The man fled when police approached after a witness wrongly fingered him as the culprit in a bar fight.

Officer in Hollywood, Florida rear-ends a woman. Woman wasn’t at fault in the crash, but she was intoxicated. Dash cam then catches four officers planning a cover up and subsequent falsification of a police report to pin the accident on the woman, not the cop. They’re on paid leave. And check out this graph from a separate story on the incident: “The last major blow to the Hollywood department’s credibility came in February 2007, when four officers were charged and later convicted of delivering heroin in an FBI sting operation. Federal authorities said at the time that they could have snared more corrupt Hollywood cops had department higher-ups not alerted colleagues to the investigation.”

West Palm Beach, Florida officers fired after dash cam catches them beating a man. Fortunately, the video also caught them huddling to get their story straight after they discovered the beating had been caught on video. Not sure why they didn’t think the story-planning wouldn’t be preserved, too."

Before he became a judge, DaLaughter was the prosecutor who hid exclupatory evidence from the jury in the murder and robbery case against Cedric Willis. Willis did 12 years at Parchman Penitentiary before he was exonerated and released in 2007."

"In 1985, then-19-year-old, openly gay Bernard Baran was convicted of molesting children at a day care center in Massachusetts...

After serving 21 years in prison, during which he was beaten and sexually assaulted by other inmates, Baran has finally been cleared of the charges. His defense team found videotapes in which children at the center tell investigators Baran never touched them. Other children who did say he abused them appear to have been coerced. The tapes were never turned over to Baran's attorneys."

"The First Amendment Center's David Hudson has an entertaining and slightly unnerving story about the various blasphemy and profanity laws still on the books in various American states. Here's a sampler:

Michigan's blasphemy law says: "Any person who shall willfully blaspheme the holy name of God, by cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor."

Oklahoma law provides: "Blasphemy consists in wantonly uttering or punishing words, casting contumelious reproach or profane ridicule upon God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Scriptures, or the Christian or any other religion." Uttering such speech is classified as a misdemeanor...."

"Suicide Girls, who were among the first advertisers ever on Boing Boing way back in the day, have released a Comic-Con themed photoset of bangin' babes in cosplay getup. Yes, yes, it's blatant booth-bait and link-bait, but these really are fun photos (vampy but work-safe, no bewbs). "

"But this is the perfect example of why it's difficult to do shows set anywhere except LA and New York...

And not "always get it wrong about the Midwest because we're in Los Angeles and New York." That's "always get it wrong even when it's about Los Angeles and New York."

...the same thing happens for every city, including the ones we writers live in. For example, I live in Los Angeles. We have a lower murder rate than Phoenix, Arizona. A lower murder rate than Indianapolis, Indiana. A lower murder rate than Wichita frikkin' Kansas.

But if you watch television -- made by people who live in LA, shot in the city of LA -- do you ever see The Closer: Minneapolis Hellhole?

No. According to network television, Los Angeles is Murderville, capitol city of Rapesylvannia.

Angelenos and New Yorkers, however, have just learned not to give a shit and enjoy SVU hunting down this week's subway sodomizer. It may be perhaps because we're busy destroying culture, but it's just something we're used to.

All this to say, we're glad you're watching the show, and assume if we come to your town and get something wrong, it's an honest mistake born of scheduling and chaos rather than laziness and willful condescension.

"So, too much sugar (including things that reduce to sugar, i.e., grain products), too much insulin, resulting in insulin resistance, and you may get "diabetes of the brain," now sometimes referred to as Type III Diabetes. [Alzheimer’s]

Now what's interesting is that ketogenic diets have been used for a long, long time (1920s) for epilepsy, and if not mistaken, recently for other neurological disorders as well. Well, another word for "ketogenic diet" is low-carb, paleo, etc.

But, there's another way to produce ketones than going ultra-low carb and producing them as the by-product of your own fat metabolism. You can just eat a lot of saturated fat...

Coming full circle, these are just the sorts of stories I like best because it affirms a principle. Let's call it The Animal Principle: Wild animals don't typically and systematically suffer from our range of diseases of civilization because they eat and behave in accordance with their natures.

First of all, if we ate and behaved in accordance with our natures, there would likely be no diabetes to speak of (not even T1), no obesity, little cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, stroke, etc., as has been observed and documented in dozens of traditional hunter-gatherer and non-industrial societies for a couple of centuries. Simply eliminate sugar and grains and you're 90% there.

...Most funny of all is that everyone's afraid to say "a class of saturated fats." Nope, "medium chain triglycerides.""

"(781): Are you seriously drinking already? It's 11AM. Still morning.(1-781): I'm going by McDonald's time. And since they stop serving breakfast at 10:30 and start serving lunch, it is now afternoon."

"'It's amazing how much jerking off kills my motivation to get things done. Shows you how much of a man's energy is just a trick to breed... On the other hand, jerking off nearly always kills my motivation to do things that I'll later regret. It's a kind of karmic maintenance' -Joe Rogan"

Thursday, August 13, 2009

"Six-year-old girl: Dad, I want to see snow!Six-year-old girl's twin: Me toooo!Dad: But girls, it doesn't snow down here--you have to go up north for that.Six-year-old girl: Then let's go up north!Six-year-old girl's twin: To the North Pole!Dad: Yeah! But you know what, mom won't let us.

"An Italian law requires drivers to wear a seatbelt. Your car makes annoying noises if you don't buckle up. So the Italians, in their own creative way, have designed a handy little plug to quiet their car. Problema finito."

"Secular Muslim salesgirl #1: What do you think of what I am wearing?Secular Muslim salesgirl #2: I'm glad you asked, it's bizarre. Why are you wearing such a short skirt? It's winter! And is that shirt actually lingerie? And why are you wearing a veil? Especially with all this? I've never seen you wear a veil!Secular Muslim salesgirl #1: My grandmother put glue in my shampoo bottle to try to force me to cover my hair and dress more conservatively. I didn't have time to fix it. I had to wear a veil. And the rest... well, I couldn't let her win.

"Student: Wait so why is everyone switching to blue ray?Professor: Because the film industry follows the porn industry. (pauses) That's the truth. That's where all the money is.Student: (stares blankly)Professor: What? It's a billion-dollar industry. I can't be the only guy who buys it.Student: (stares horrified)Professor: Fuck you. I have tenure.

"I love it. The following is an account of Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talking to Albert Jazeera:

“When asked why the United States was not in FATA despite having the knowledge that Al Qaeda was present there, he [Admiral Mullen] said, ‘Because FATA is in Pakistan and Pakistan is a sovereign country and we don’t go into sovereign countries.’”

Hahn? The hell we don’t. What was this buoyant cannibal thinking? The US loves to go into sovereign countries. It hardly does anything else. I suppose Iraq wasn’t sovereign. It isn’t now, but it was. How about Panama, Laos, Cambodia,? We gave Pakistan, until recently sovereign, the choice of inviting us to kill its people with drones, or else be bombed into the Stone Age. Recently we have bombed Somalia, technically sovereign.

When the Pentagon’s alpha-floater says something so transparently nonsensical, so patently false, one wonders: Is he merely lying, or does he somehow actually believe this stuff? I mean, drugs are supposed to be discouraged by the Navy..."

"It's not your mother or your father. Not your sister or your brother. It's not your God or your Government. It's not the high school bully or your eighth grade home room teacher. It's not your therapist or your wife or your boyfriend. It's not luck or even circumstance. It's not your height, weight or age that makes life great, or not. It's You! It's you that makes you happy or sad. It's you that makes you smart or stupid. It's you that eats right or not. It's you that chooses to exercise or to sit on your ass..."

"I guess we could start with the assumption that politicians always, or even mostly, act in the interest of the public, instead of the interests of politicians. They don’t. There’s the assumption that the skills and talents it takes to get elected are the same skills and talents one needs to govern effectively. They aren’t. There’s the assumption that any one person or even any group of people has even a fraction of the collected wisdom distributed over the course of billions of voluntary exchanges that make up an $11 trillion economy. They don’t. There’s the assumption that even if such a freakishly smart person existed, that person would also possess the political skills necessary to rise to become powerful enough to actually impart his wisdom to the people who can turn it into policy. And then there’s the assumption that even if said freakishly smart person could rise to have the president’s ear, that his advice would be heeded by Congress, and not corrupted, diluted, or merely subverted by special interests and the whims, turf wars, and power plays of politicians in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

"...The result is a deeply ingrained systemic assumption that saturated fat is evil, bad, dangerous, and sinful, a preconceived notion that precludes any meaningful dialogue from taking place. Everyone “knows” that saturated fat clogs your arteries – that’s treated as a given – and attempting to even question that assumption gets you lumped in the crazy category. After all, if you start from such a “fundamentally incorrect position,” how can the rest of your argument be trusted? Thus, talk of the superior cardiovascular health of the Tokelau (with their 50% dietary saturated fat intake) or the Masai (with their diet of meat, blood, and milk) or the Inuit (with their ancestral diet of high-blubber animals) is all disregarded or ignored. If they even deign to listen to the facts, they’ll acknowledge the existence of healthy populations eating tons of saturated fat while muttering something about “genetic adaptation” or “statistical outliers.” It’s all hogwash, and it’s infuriating, especially when there’s so much literature refuting the saturated fat hypothesis..."